I use them as bedding in my worm bin and they last for years. In fact, I have added more, but never replaced the ones I started with four or five years ago. Some have lost their shape a bit, but that's all. Sometimes I'll find a stray one in my compost bin or a garden bed and it stays there forever until I put it back in the worm bin.

If you can compost these babies, you are a far better composter than I!

You would probably have to smash them up... get them to crumble. Cork is a great material for bottle stops and flooring because its nearly impermeable - which would leave me to believe it would be very hard to compost. But I think clean cork, crumbled up, wouldn't be bad for the soil - even uncomposted.

Yes, if you could grind them into particles, they might make a good soil amendment. I don't have a chipper, :-( or I would have tried that long ago. I sliced a few into disks with scissors as an experiment several years ago, and every now and every now and then one surfaces in my soil or bin, basically unaltered.

But don't even try with the 2003 Domaine Chante Cigale Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Those corks will be gumming up your tiller, sticking to your pitchfork tines so ya gotta scrape them off constantly, and popping up in your potting soil for years.

Somebody offered this tip in an issue of Harrowsmith magazine: put wine corks in the bottoms of planters as a natural light-weight replacement for styrofoam or whatever. They absorb some moisture, help drainage and prevent the soil from drying out. Haven't tried it, need to drink more. You should come up to Nova Scotia for a visit David, I like your taste in wine (you bring the wine).

If it came from the port of Halifax - I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy's compost. Although our provicial capital is supposed to be putting in a state of the art disposal system soon, and no longer letting the stuff go straight into the harbour -